In this podcast interview, Terri McClure, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, shares
her predictions that the majority of data storage will be scale-out within a few years and that the
cloud
is rapidly emerging as a NAS tier. Read the transcript below or download the MP3.

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Changing face of scale-out network-attached storage

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SearchStorage.com: How has NAS changed during the last year or so? What are the major new
developments?

McClure: The biggest change seems to be the emergence of scale-out as a viable enterprise
IT solution. Scale-out NAS
really started in niche markets roughly a decade ago, so it's certainly not brand new. These
systems typically excelled in handling high-throughput applications such as media, entertainment,
geospatial imaging or bioinformatics applications, and that's because of the bandwidth they can
provide. But what is new is that we've seen a class of products emerge that fits the more file
I/O-intensive performance requirements typical of enterprise IT shops. These systems are coming
from the likes of BlueArc and Hitachi Data Systems, which resells BlueArc. EMC’s Isilon has made
advances in this area, and the Hewlett-Packard X9000 would be another example.

Aside from the vendors bringing out new offerings, we're also seeing end users pull for these
types of systems, primarily for the scalability, since these systems often scale almost linearly
from a capacity and performance standpoint into the multipetabyte range and maintain a single
system image. That makes them very easy to manage and helps users get much better utilization
rates. So, we're actually seeing it come at IT from both directions -- the vendor push and the user
pull for these types of requirements.

SearchStorage.com: What advice do you have for IT shops that are considering scale-out NAS
but have experience only with traditional NAS products?

McClure: Use case is really important here. Because of where these systems came from,
some systems have advanced from the early niche market days and can handle more small-file,
I/O-intensive applications. But many are still optimized for large-file sequential performance.
Also, since the markets these systems originally served didn't require a lot of the advanced
features common to traditional
NAS systems, like synchronous remote mirroring or read-only snaps, many of the scale-out
systems still lag in that type of advanced functionality and the overall functionality still varies
quite a bit. With some systems, they can tier within a global
namespace and automate data movement and migration all the way out to tape, while with others,
you just get one flavor or tier of performance.

I would suggest it's really important to get references to talk to, specifically users that have
similar application workload and data protection requirements, to make sure the vendor you're
dealing with can meet the performance and functionality requirements you have for your enterprise
IT apps.

SearchStorage.com: What are the main challenges associated with implementing scale-out
network-attached storage?

McClure: These systems have a multi-node nature. There's a lot of NAS heads that are
connected together and grouped and managed within a single system, but that also means greater
network connectivity. You have to plan for additional network connectivity, and sometimes upfront
there may be more power and cooling requirements because with some systems you have to deploy a
minimum of three nodes just to get into the system for availability and performance
requirements.

Interestingly enough, as the system grows, because of the better utilization and granular nature
at which you can scale -- we call it just-in-time scale with scale-out
systems -- the power and cooling advantage will actually swing the other way, and scale-out
systems will carry an advantage when it comes to utilization and power, cooling consumption. But to
start out with, the network connectivity requirements you have to plan for are really important,
and the additional possible power and cooling requirements [are] also.

SearchStorage.com: Can you foresee a day when scale-out NAS will represent the majority of
the network-attached storage systems in use?

McClure: Yes. We recently published a scale-out storage forecast in which we predicted
that scale-out storage will make up 80% of all external network storage systems by 2015.
Interestingly enough, we didn't separate SANs [storage-area networks] and NAS in our forecast, and
that's because we believe that over time, scale-out systems that support both block
and file storage will be the norm. We actually expect the norm will be systems that can scale
in multiple dimensions: scale up, scale out and scale linearly. If a system can scale in multiple
dimensions, we actually classified them for the purposes of this forecast as scale-out systems.
That said, we don't see traditional scale-up
systems going away. They'll still be around, partly because in storage nothing ever seems to go
away and partly because this is very use-case dependent. Workloads will continue to be stratified,
and so will the storage that supports them.

SearchStorage.com: What about using the cloud as a NAS tier? Is that ready for prime
time?

McClure: Scale-out's still early in the enterprise IT adoption cycle, and cloud's even
earlier. We're starting to see it emerge, and it just makes sense. As a small- or a mid-sized
business or a startup, why invest all the capital equipment to build your own IT? Nasuni is doing
pretty well with its solution. F5 [Networks] is seeing some uptake with its ARX tiering to the
cloud. We're certainly seeing it begin in the commercial space. And look at the adoption of
Dropbox; I don't know anybody that doesn't use it nowadays. And that's basically a file system in
the sky, in the cloud. Our research also indicates that users are willing to invest in IT as a
service for both infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service [SaaS]. Our 2011 IT spending intentions survey found that
spending for cloud-based
services in 2011 is up substantially against 2010. It's still not at the top of the list, it's
about halfway down the priority list, but it made a big jump in enterprise IT priorities this past
year.

SearchStorage.com: How are data storage vendors addressing the challenges associated with
using cloud as a NAS tier, and in what areas do they still have a lot of work to do?

McClure: Most of the work is related to making users feel comfortable with the
technology. The biggest inhibitors continue to be trust, security and concerns about data
availability. And it doesn't help when we hear about outages. There are best practices that can be
deployed to mitigate the concerns. Nasuni, TwinStrata, StorSimple and Panzura all provide gateways
that allow users to do things like mirror between clouds, so you're insulated from the outage of
one cloud by servicing your data request from the other, or encrypting and snapshotting for data
availability.

We're still early in the learning curve, and we're still developing best practices. Things are
moving forward fast so it's imperative to keep abreast of developments. That's the No. 1 thing I'd
suggest. You have to keep abreast of the developments in the industry because things tend to take
forever to change in IT. But with what's happening on the cloud front today, things are changing
faster than I've seen them change in the last 20 years, so it's important to keep on top of what's
going on out there.